Oh Hell strategy
Count your sure tricks first: high trumps, and aces in suits you hold only a few of. Add a little for a short suit you can trump. In small hands, bid low unless you lead or hold a high trump. Once you have your bid, stop winning: duck under every trick and get rid of your high cards. And when your bid is already lost, spoil the other players' bids instead.
Count your tricks before you bid
Our strong player gives every card a chance of winning a trick and adds them up. It's the same counting a good player does in their head:
- Trumps are worth the most. The ace of trumps always wins. A lower trump wins when the trumps above it are few enough for your own higher trumps to pull them out, or when the cards above it are likely still in the pack.
- Side aces (aces in suits that aren't trumps) win when nobody trumps them, which is likelier when you hold only one or two cards of that suit, so the others still have some.
- Kings and queens count only when the cards above them are likely out of play or in your own hand.
- A short suit (none or one card) lets a spare low trump win a trick when that suit is led.
In a 10-card hand with four players, 40 of the 52 cards are in the players' hands, so most high cards are out there. In a 1-card hand only 4 are, so a queen of trumps is often the best card at the table. The count has to change with the size of the hand, and ours does.
How close does it get? Over 133,000 hands, the strong player's count, rounded to a whole number, matched the tricks it took 52% of the time and was within one trick 93% of the time. Missing by one is the normal way to lose points in this game.
How often bids are made
Small hands are easier to call; big hands have more that can go wrong. This is how often our strong players took exactly their bid, by the cards in each hand, at a table of four:
| Cards each | Bids made | The dealer's bids made | Everyone else's | Bids of 0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 75% | 53% | 82% | 84% |
| 2 | 69% | 56% | 73% | 68% |
| 3 | 64% | 55% | 67% | 44% |
| 4 | 58% | 53% | 60% | 22% |
| 5 | 53% | 52% | 54% | 9% |
| 6 | 50% | 48% | 50% | 3% |
| 7 | 46% | 46% | 46% | 1% |
| 8 | 46% | 43% | 47% | 1% |
| 9 | 46% | 44% | 46% | 1% |
| 10 | 43% | 43% | 43% | 0% |
Over a whole game, the strong players made 54% of their bids with four at the table and 46% with three. A winning total averaged 140.5 points with four players and 124.7 with three.
Small hands: bid low, unless you lead
With 1 or 2 cards each, most hands win nothing. In 1-card hands, our strong players bid 0 84% of the time. Your one card wins if it's a high trump, or if you lead it and nobody can follow with a higher card or trump it. So a side ace is worth a lot more when you sit on the dealer's left and lead first.
Bidding zero
A bid of 0 scores 10 when you take no tricks, only 1 point less than a bid of 1 that you make. It's a good bid with low cards and no trumps above the middle. It gets harder as the hands grow: zero bids were common in small hands and rare in big ones (see the table above), but when our strong player did bid 0 with 4 or more cards, it made it most of the time, because it only did so with a clearly weak hand.
Playing a zero bid: throw your highest cards whenever you can't follow suit, and when you must follow, play the highest card that still loses.
Once you have your bid, duck
Every trick after your bid costs you the whole hand under exact scoring. As soon as you have your tricks:
- Play under. Follow with the highest card that still loses the trick. That gets rid of a card that might win later.
- Throw high cards. When you can't follow suit, throw your highest card of another suit, not a trump.
- Lead low. Lead a small card in a suit where plenty of higher cards are still out.
Until then, win as cheaply as you can: when you play last, use the lowest card that wins; when you're out of the suit led, trump low.
When your bid is lost, spoil
Once you've taken one trick too many, nothing you do this hand scores for you (with exact scoring). You can still change who else scores. Take tricks away from a player who still needs them, and let a player who has already made their bid win one more. Our strong player does exactly that. With the "1 a trick, plus 10" scoring it's different: every trick is still worth a point, so it keeps winning.
The dealer
The dealer bids last and knows every other bid, but the hook rule bars one number. In our games the dealer made their bid 49% of the time, against 56% for the other players. The gap is widest in small hands, where the barred number is often the one the dealer wanted: in 1-card hands the dealer made 53% against 82%. Without the hook, in 300 more games, the dealer made 57%, and the bids added up to exactly the number of tricks in 28% of hands.
Everyone else can use the bids too. When the bids add up to more than the tricks, somebody has to fall short, so tricks will be fought over. When they add up to less, somebody will be stuck with extras, so be ready to duck.
Does any of this matter?
Our easy player bids its aces and its king of trumps, plays its highest card whenever it wants a trick and its lowest when it doesn't. One strong player against three easy ones won 668 of 1,000 games, where an even share would be 250, and made 56% of its bids against 43% for the easy players. At a table of three, one strong player against two easy ones won 805 of 1,000.
Try the habits out: play Oh Hell against the computer, and use the Hint button to see which card the strong player would choose and why. Playing at a real table? Keep the totals on the Oh Hell score sheet.
Keep playing
- Play Oh HellThree or four at the table: the computer in every other chair, or friends by link.
- How to playThe deal, the trump card, bidding and the dealer rule, the play and the scoring.
- Score sheetKeep score for a real game on screen, or print a blank sheet.
- SpadesBidding and tricks with a partner: make your contract and dodge the bags.
- Gin RummyMake sets and runs, knock when your deadwood is low, or go gin.
Strategy for similar games: spades strategy, gin rummy strategy and cribbage strategy.